Navigate:

New York Times vs. natural gas industry

A series of critical articles in the paper has the natural gas industry fuming. |
AP Photo
Close

Urbina has his defenders, though. One anti-gas group called Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy has started a Facebook page — “We Stand with Ian Urbina” — that as of Friday had 84 fans. A letter generator on the group’s site sent more than 1,300 letters online letter generator, or another letter that the Catskill Citizens circulated on various listserves for people to use as a template

Bruce Ferguson, a member of the group, said the industry attacks on the Times are an intentional distraction. “That’s what it was designed to do. It was intended to distract; it’s ‘kill the messenger.’”

Text Size

-

+

reset

What’s undisputed is that Urbina's “Drilling Down” series has moved the needle on shale gas in real ways.

An initial set of articles in February, reporting that radioactive wastewater from fracked wells was being dumped into Pennsylvania waterways, prodded the EPA to investigate the claims and call for testing. State officials announced in March that water samples taken last year from seven Pennsylvania rivers showed no signs of abnormal radiation, although the EPA followed up by pressing both the state and several gas companies for more detailed information.

Pennsylvania also asked drillers to stop discharging the wastewater to treatment plants that aren’t equipped to handle it, citing pollution concerns that the industry calls unrelated to Urbina’s story.

Shale gas producers saw their stock prices inch down in the days after the June stories appeared.

Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper said the Times’s stories have also spurred the industry to take action.

"The New York Times is the big time. When they say things, they have a great deal of journalistic credibility,” Hickenlooper said at an industry conference in Denver in early August, as reported by Platts. “I disagree with a large amount of what was in those articles ... but their reach is so deep, it's made a lot of oil and gas people say, 'Maybe we have to go further than we thought we had to.'"

Hanger agreed that people are paying attention to the Times’s stories. “They have affected how millions of Americans view the industry,” he told POLITICO.

Brisbane, the Times’s public editor, declined to comment to POLITICO, pointing to his published columns.

Of Urbina’s story on shale gas economics, Brisbane wrote that the article “went out on a limb, lacked an in-depth dissenting view in the text and should have made clear that shale gas had boomed.”

In a second column, Brisbane objected to a late July story from Urbina that quoted emails from C. Hobson Bryan, a former Energy Information Administration intern, and described him with different qualifiers throughout the article — “official,” “energy analyst” and “federal analyst.” (Bryan had moved up to an engineer post at EIA by the time he wrote some of the emails.) The result was that readers could leave the article thinking various people were backing up Bryan’s claims.

“Anonymous material says to the reader: Trust us,” Brisbane wrote. “But if the reader ends up feeling burned — if, for example, an ‘official’ proves to be an intern — the trust won’t be there the next time.”

Editors overseeing the Times's news coverage said they stood by their decision to use the redacted emails from Bryan. The paper said it tried to get the documents through open records laws, but were denied. They later published uncensored versions after the EIA provided the emails to Congress.

“The process of redacting is not a science and requires many judgment calls,” National Editor Rick Berke and Bryant, the deputy national editor, wrote in a response to Brisbane. The editors chose to take the unusual step of rebutting Brisbane’s comments in print because they felt the column’s criticisms were unfounded and missed the larger point of the articles.

They added: “We decided to publish the story and online documents because we assumed readers would rather see redacted documents than no documents at all, particularly given the controversial debate under way about the role of shale gas in U.S. energy policy.”

Former Times public editor Okrent isn’t surprised to see Brisbane’s criticisms become ammunition against the newspaper. Okrent said that when he was in the ombudsman seat, he routinely saw his column used in whatever ideological fight he’d waded into.

“It happened time and again whenever I wrote something critical,” Okrent said in an interview. “The irony is that people who on Monday say ‘I don’t trust anything in the Times,’ the next day, if I write something that supports their position, they have no problems citing it.”

Bob King contributed to this report.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 5:38 a.m. on August 8, 2011.

Readers' Comments (25)

Consider that the NY Times continues to print krugman's idiocy, so why would anyone pay any attention to anything they print? The are about to become part of the extinction happening to print media. Good riddance.

"A series of critical articles in the paper of record has the natural gas industry fuming as it struggles to persuade the public that hydraulic fracturing is a safe, clean, inexpensive and reliable way of securing the nation’s energy supply for decades to come."

is the author of this article serious? The NYT has not been the paper of record for years. Guaranteed that many f the accusations in the Times article will be proved to be inaccurate or outright false.

Numerous studies and reports from the gas industry say fracking is safe. Independent studies say something completely different. The "safely used since the 50s" line is just a talking point, and a misleading one at that. Horizontal drilling has only come in to play recently, and advances and hydrofracking technology has completely changed the gas drilling game. That is why it is such a big deal right now, it is new. Do you (flapper) really think a driller from the fifties could walk on to a fracking pad today and know what was going on? No. And niether would the majority of people. Thats why we cannot take the gas industry at face value. As politico rightly pointed out, the attacks on the times are all ad hominem, no one refutes that water has been poisoned, or that there was a dangerous overestimation of reserves.

The major point here is not so much the dangers of fracking: it is that Wall Street's money managers MUST have absolute control over every aspect of American business. In the energy sector, they have absolute control over oil resources in Alaska and the Gulf region. They have absolute dictatorial power over the coal industry to inclue the natural resources of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Wyoming and Kentucky. The thought that any person, group of people, state or business would somehow not be controlled by the New York money managers is beyond absurd. The fact that the New York Times is in charge of the Progressive Tyranny Propaganda Division-"Helping to Sequester and Steal"- should likewise come as no surprise.

deus-ex-machinus: "...As Politico rightly pointed out, the attacks on the Times are all ad hominem, no one refutes that water has been poisoned..."

One claim is that fracking creates cracks in rock formations that allow chemicals to leach into sources of fresh water. The problem with this argument is that the average shale formation is thousands of feet underground, while the average drinking well or aquifer is a few hundred feet deep. Separating the two is solid rock. This geological reality explains why EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, a determined enemy of fossil fuels, recently told Congress that there have been no "proven cases where the fracking process itself has affected water." Wall Street Journal

No one but that right wing fanatic Lisa Jackson, head of the Obama EPA. You realize, of course, that someone or something or both is/are guilty of blatant bullsh*t? Who is it?

The New York times is against all forms of energy that are affordable. Elites say they are willing to have their energy bills tripled. Limousine Liberals could easily afford a tripling in their energy bills. The times considers cost to be an insignificant issue. Liberals are insensitive to the economic cost of their endless spending proposals. Grow up. We can no longer afford to have children with credit cards running our country. The simple fact is natural gas costs less than one third as much as imported oil and it should be used in place of oil when possible. Fighting wars for foreign oil because the Times doesn't want a cleaner fuel makes absolutely no sense.

Fracing has been done since the 50's and numerous studies and reports say it is safe.

Not just you Flappy. All of you are clueless. Yeah worry about about the deficit you morons because that's what is gonna be important to your grandchildren. They won't have clean water coming outta their faucets anymore and they'll have to wear masks when they go outside and probably 100SPF sunblock but that's okay cause they won't have any debt. idiots...naive idiots.

Fracking has been going on safely and efficiently for decades and so has the natural migration of methane gas into the water table.Neither has an effect on the other and just as with our drilling offshore and in anwar,this is only another ploy by the obama administration to block us from drilling for our own energy independence and making us more dependent on countries like venezuela who we gave 2 billion dollasr to so they can explore for oil in the very location the administration has put off limits to our drilling.Vietnam and China are drilling wells in areas we are not allowed to and i guarantee if they have a major blowout they will just run or cover it up this is only one more of obamas schemes to purposely destroy our energy independence and our economy in the name of fundamental change to marxist totalitarianism.

John Hanger ought not throw stones. He should be ashamed of himself, instead of pointing fingers at truth-tellers. He broke his promise (while standing in a church no less!!) to affected Dimock residents to have a water pipeline put in place to replace their water ruined by drillers. He and his toothless, impotent DEP simply didn't have the guts to force Cabot to make these people whole. That is his legacy-- an enabler of mean-spirited bullying corporate behavior. Heck of a job, Hanger.

If the NY Times had been covering the energy industry in the past the way it does now, they would have been totally against steam trains and the transcontinental rail effort. They would have been against replacing whale blubber with petroleum from the ground thus killing off the whales. They would have been against the gasoline powered car giving us horse manure everywhere. They would have been against water powered electrical generating plants. They would have been against coal fired electrical generating plants. They would have been against nuclear power generating plants leaving us with no air conditioning, no computers and still reading by candles. They would have been against concrete and asphalt leaving us with dirt streets. I have come to the conclusion that the NY Times is a reactionary organization and their views come from a cave-man mentality. Will someone please ask them to move into the 21st century with the rest of us?

Does the writer of this fawning, leftist article not understand that the SEC performs reviews of oil and gas company reserve estimates as the normal course of its business? There is literally nothing at all unusual about the recently announced reviews, other than the fact that ignorant leftwing media mavens have decided to report on them. Urbina's ridiculous, fact-devoid articles did not "spur" those reviews, but he did spur poorly-though pieces like this one.

Does the writer of this fawning, leftist article not understand that the SEC performs reviews of oil and gas company reserve estimates as the normal course of its business? There is literally nothing at all unusual about the recently announced reviews, other than the fact that ignorant leftwing media mavens have decided to report on them. Urbina's ridiculous, fact-devoid articles did not "spur" those reviews, but he did spur poorly-though pieces like this one.